This is Laura's first novel, but you couldn't tell it. It is well written, hot, sexy, and well worth your time and money. Is it perfect? No, but it is pretty darn close. One of my biggest complaints about it is that it's just too short. At only about 100 pages, it does a great job setting up the situation, but it could have been triple the size and I wouldn't have complained.
Dana Grayling comes from a long line of high class butlers, serving the needs of their wealthy clients for many generations. Dana is the only child of her father, and the Grayling family believes that she spells the end of the Grayling legacy, never imagining a woman could possibly be a butler. But Dana is out to prove them wrong. Without her families support, she signs up with a discrete estate management company called Aurora. Aurora specializes in providing butlers to their rich clients with special clauses in their contracts. Clauses that give the Master of the House certain unusual rights. Basically the butler is required to cater to every need of the Master, every single need. They essentially become sex slaves to their masters for the length of the contract, in addition to managing the staff and running the household.
Dana knew all this going in, but it was the only way she could get her foot inside the door toward becoming the butler she believed she was destined to become. She was willing to put up with this for a year as a means toward a greater goal. She never counted on falling for her Master. She never realized how much she would come to crave the submission he forced out of her. What started out as an ordeal to suffer through, soon became much more.
Her new Master commanded her, teaching her things she never could have learned elsewhere. The night he first took her is one of the best sex scenes I've read in a long time. I got very turned on myself, and to be honest that does not often happen to me often when reading these books.
I wish the author had spent more time at the beginning explaining Dana's decision to sign with Aurora, and exactly what her goal was. I eventually understood it was to work as butler for a famous wealthy family, one her own family had spent generations serving. But that was never made quite as clear as I think it could have been. I also wish she had spent more time on the relationship between Dana and her Master. Their dynamic together was simply fantastic and I wanted more of it.
Laura LaPlace has what it takes to write smart, sexy books, and I hope she continues to write for many years to come. I will be looking forward to her next novel.